Canada’s public servants won’t buy Conservative leader Stephen Harper’s last-minute love letter to them because respect and the ability to do their jobs — not sick leave benefits and pensions — are what they are fighting for in this election.

Debi Daviau, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, said Harper’s recent open letter to public servants, patting them on the back and offering assurances that sick leave reform will be fair and pensions untouched, totally missed the mark of what public servants their and unions are campaigning for.

“We aren’t active in this election because of sick leave and pensions … These aren’t public servants’ issues and I don’t think our members will be fooled by it,” said Daviau.

“What it comes down to is that we don’t believe that Canada’s public service can survive another Harper government mandate.”

Harper’s letter zeros in on sick leave and pensions — the terms and conditions of public service employment that have been under attack by the Conservatives. Sick leave is the big hot-button issue in the ongoing round of collective bargaining with federal unions.

But Daviau said those are “Harper’s issues” and the letter is a “trap” — a last-minute effort to woo the public service vote in Ottawa while portraying public servants for Canadians as “petty” and only concerned with pay and benefits.

Federal unions have been very active in this campaign, their focus on eroding public services caused by budget cuts and the deteriorating relationship between public servants and the government. For many public servants, the big concerns revolve around the culture of fear and erosion of the traditional role of the public service.

The Liberals and NDP have both announced public service platforms aimed at rebuilding the relationship and restoring trust.

Harper has taken swipes at the bureaucracy on the campaign and his letter came only after the other parties made their appeals for the public service vote.

But Daviau said the letter must be taken with “grain of salt” because the Conservative party was the only one of the major parties that failed to reply to the union’s survey on top public service issues.

Those issues included the muzzling of scientists, the long-form census, science research, cash-strapped public services, auditing tax evasion, and restoring collective bargaining rights taken away by the Conservatives.

She said all the NDP candidates and Liberals provided full responses but the Conservatives didn’t even acknowledge the survey. She said the Bloc Québécois wasn’t asked to respond but it still sent in its responses.

Daviau said the Conservatives “must be feeling the heat” in the four Ottawa-area ridings unions are targeting to unseat the Conservatives. PIPSC, for example, has an advertising campaign, distributed Vote for Public Services lawn signs, and recruited union members for door-to-door canvassing of public servants,

But pension changes are always a concern. The government doesn’t have to negotiate those with unions and can simply change the legislation, which the Conservatives have already done. As a result, Harper’s efforts to reassure public servants that the government has no plans for further changes to the public service pension plan were met with skepticism and “concern.”

The letter said the government won’t be “moving away” from the current defined-benefit plan to a defined-contribution plan, target benefit plan or any other kind of shared-risk model.

Members of a new Canadian Coalition of Pension Security said the writing is already on the wall for Crown corporations to convert to target benefit pension plans. Canada Post is already having “consultations” to change its pensions.

Coalition spokesman Jean Guy Soulière said concerns about sick leave and pensions are “expressions of how public servants have been treated” and that “malaise” is creeping among pensioners because if the government attacks employees pension benefits, “they will do it to retirees.”

And the speculation has long been that once the Crown corporations are converted, the government will set its sights on the pensions of the public service, military and RCMP.

“It scares me even more when they come out at the 11th hour saying, ‘Don’t worry, trust us, we won’t come after your pensions,” said Peter Whitaker, a Canada Post retiree.

“If they get us, they will go after the public service, and then there will be no such thing as a guaranteed pension in the federal public sector.”

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